[ExI] Your vote doesn't count?

Adrian Tymes atymes at gmail.com
Tue Mar 22 01:32:41 UTC 2016


On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 5:59 PM, Dan TheBookMan <danust2012 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Mar 21, 2016, at 3:26 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mar 21, 2016 8:56 AM, "Dan TheBookMan" <danust2012 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > http://reason.com/archives/2012/10/03/your-vote-doesnt-count
> >
> > I've never seem anyone brandish the "voting is fun" argument.
>
> He ignores the herd argument.
>
>
> I always presumed Katherine was a she. Am I wrong?
>

You're right.  I didn't see the byline.


> She's not really arguing so much about a small immediate benefit, but
> against the belief that there's any benefit to voting -- at least according
> to the typical arguments arrayed against not voting.
>
> A prisoner's dilemma argument might work if your not voting had much of an
> impact. It likely has no impact. And by likely, she quantifies this to a
> one in sixty million chance.
>

"Extremely small" is not "zero".  We're talking about large numbers of
people here; that's why I said "herd", as in "herd immunity" for vaccines.
It's okay if 1 or 100 people don't get vaccinated out of 1 million, but
it's not okay if 100,000 don't, and no one is the one person who pushed it
over the edge.

Thus in this case: okay, you'll have an extremely small impact.  That
doesn't mean it's the same as no impact.  You can't change the behavior of
all those other voters but you can change your own - and know that a number
of people will think like you, coming to the same conclusions as you based
on the same data.  (When was the last time, in any county-wide-or-higher
election, where you voted and yours was literally the only vote for a
certain candidate or for/against a certain measure?)
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